[ad_1]
If you’ve ever spent your morning commute daydreaming about starting afresh with your career, this feature is for you.
Each Monday, we speak to someone from a different profession to discover what it’s really like. This week we chat to Professor Jon Copley, a marine biologist at the School of Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton…
A typical salary for a marine biologist… starting at a UK university after completing a PhD qualification is around £35,000 and can reach around £75,000 at a UK university after a couple of decades.
I’ve witnessed perhaps some of the better and worse aspects of humanity on expeditions… on the better side: scientists who seldom agree about anything struck speechless and in tears of awe at what we’re seeing for the first time as we explore the deep ocean, which gives me hope that we can be united in wonder at the astonishing world around us.
But on the worse side… regularly finding litter that has already reached those parts of our planet, before we’ve explored them for the first time. So that’s our capacity as human beings: we can work together to achieve remarkable things, but we’re also capable of such harmful selfishness.
Don’t let your job define your identity… Define yourself by what you care about, which you may be able to pursue through your career, but also in your wider life outside your work.
The one thing I hate about my job is… the growing burden of administrative bureaucracy in research and teaching, which often seems to expand without providing clear benefits.
One of my most memorable moments was… discovering some hot springs on the ocean floor a mile and a half deep in the Antarctic, where volcanically heated water gushes out of the seabed and builds mineral spires a couple of storeys high, which are festooned with deep-sea animals. It’s an astonishing colony of deep-sea life, as…
[ad_2]
